"1919": Poems Layered with Chicago History

 

"It's hard to explain," I said. The kind woman on the trail could see that I'd pulled my bike over to stand still and cry.

Hard to explain how a poet I don't know, Eve L. Ewing, reading a poem from her new collection 1919 about a racial incident in Chicago during that year could have such an impact on me now listening to NPR one day in June 2020.

PHOTO: 1919. Poems by Eve L. Ewing. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2019. Cover artwork by Brian Dovie Golden, www.briandoviegolden.com

There are so many layers to the work.  You had to hear Ewing explain how the killing of seventeen-year-old Eugene Williams touched off three days of race-specific violence in Chicago, late July 1919. Ewing told interviewer Terry Gross on WHYY's Fresh Air how the young man, cooling off in Lake Michigan, drifted to an area claimed by whites, who threw stones at him and at any blacks who came near. No one knows for sure if a rock struck Eugene unconscious, or if, afraid to come ashore, he exhausted his strength. He drowned.

The background gave immediate power to the poem "Jump / Rope." The poet began

Little Eugene Gene Gene
Sweetest I've seen seen seen
His mama told him him
Them white boys mean mean mean...

She sang the words in the style of ditties that little girls chant when they jump rope together. But she halted, "no, it goes like..." and started over; then she did it again. Each childlike verse comes closer to the harrowing event, closer to what we can imagine of Eugene's own experience:

Sweet sweet baby
Don't make me let you go
Swallow swallow grab the sky
Swallow swallow dark...

How can I explain that, even writing this now, I'm tearing up? The story was sad enough, but the emotion hit hard when the story was filtered through those sing-song lines. The playfulness of the form gets us into the mind of young Eugene, playing in the water, free of care for the invisible line he had crossed.

Ewing didn't have to explain how the title suggests both the child's game of jump rope and the lynchings by noose, so common for so long. Nor could she have known that her book would come out on a wave of current stories of young black adults killed for nothing: George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Rashard Brooks, Breonna Taylor, and Elijah McClain.

In the moment that Ewing read her poem, I couldn't sort all these threads of meaning and feeling that constricted my throat. To the helpful woman, I just choked out, "It's hard to explain." When she was gone, I ordered the book.

Ewing's 1919, brief and illustrated, appears to be a simple children's book, but the cover depicts a moment of horror, Eugene's face, half submerged, eyes wide open in distress. Ewing enriches her collection with the layering of history texts and photos, of different voices past and present, and a variety of forms. Each layer reinforces the other. Where the historical note seems dry, her poetry pulls us in; where the verse seems obscure to me, the historical record fills in the back story. For most poems, there's an epigraph, usually taken from the report of community leaders in Chicago in the early 1920s, half of them black, half of them white, commissioned to explain why the incident and the riots happened.

The tense prelude and violent aftermath of Eugene's death are central to the collection. Before that, the first part of the book enlarges on the commission's report about the influx of black families escaping the South since the collapse of Reconstruction. A third part, looking across the intervening decades, includes some poems previously published.

Ewing begins each part of the book with a poem called "Exodus," 1, 5, and 10. She's taking off from the commission's observation that the black migrants to Chicago spoke of their leaving the South in Biblical terms from the exodus of God's chosen people out of slavery into the Promised Land. Ewing plays with the Biblical stories and phrases. In Exodus 1, not the mother of Moses but all young black mothers in the South place their babies in baskets to send them up the river to freedom. Exodus 5 brings God into judgement on the Chicago politician Richard Daly, whose biographer called him the American Pharaoh. In 1919, Daly was member of a gang of white boys who terrorized black neighborhoods in the riots. Exodus 10 takes off from the plague of darkness, reassuring to the black community, fearful to the wicked.

For other poems as well, Ewing fits the form to the subject. A former teacher now covered in offal from working in the stockyard remembers fondly in 26 alphabetical lines how he instilled self-respect with literacy for black children in the South. A domestic worker, silently resenting her employer, speaks to us in short journal entries, all lower-case letters. Ewing gives us banter about "how hot is it" under an ominous title from Langston Hughes: or does it explode, expressing the tension rising during the heat wave of July 1919.  The story of a barricade that black men set up to protect their neighborhoods is told in a poem shaped like that barricade.

An outstanding poem, "James Crawford Speaks," tells of Eugene from the point of view of a black eye-witness, who fired his gun at policemen that arrived on the scene, who was himself shot and killed. "I saw the whites of [Eugene's] eyes," the voice begins,

before he let go the railroad tie
that kept him almost afloat
almost alive, almost able to walk home...

But what's at home for a black boy in Chicago of this time? The boy is "almost nobody, nowhere, gone home / to nothing. Me, too." The poem is very strong, imagining the gun shot as a statement: We are somebody. Black lives matter.

Ewing reminds us of another teenage black boy from Chicago who died violently at the hands of white men, only the poem is gentle and sweet, a vision of what might have been had the boy lived to become an elder in the community. We know the photo of Emmett Till at 14, grinning under his porkpie hat, taken in the year of his gruesome murder. We know the photo of his bludgeoned face in his open casket. Ewing's poem begins, "I saw Emmett Till this week at the grocery store," a gentle old man grinning under his porkpie hat. The poem is a benediction.

Telling a friend about that poem, I cried again. Hard to explain.There are so many layers.